


Let's Stay In Tonight

by bomberqueen17



Series: Choice Is Not A Word A Bullet Knows [4]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Art, Colorblindness, Exhibitionism, F/M, Fluff, Lipstick, Makeup, Makeup Kink, Multi, One Shot, Super Soldier Serum, Voyeurism, implied ot4 - Freeform, pre-ot4?, red lipstick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-26
Updated: 2014-08-26
Packaged: 2018-02-14 20:33:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2202105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is in continuity with the series I'm working on, but much much later. It works fine as a standalone, though. <br/>Natasha talks about art with Steve, and is inspired to help him with an art project. <br/>Bucky is a very willing participant.<br/>Inspired by various people's ruminations and headcanons about Steve Rogers' barely-mentioned pre-serum colorblindness in the MCU. I know I'm not the only one who observed that the brightest-colored thing in the room immediately after his transformation would have been the blood-red lipstick Peggy Carter was wearing. <br/>You think maybe that gave him a kink?</p>
<p>I was going to wait and post this at a point where it fit in with the timeline of the stuff I'm working on, but it's my birthday and I do what I want. Softcore-porny fluff is what I want. So there. <br/>(Sorry, Sam is basically a cameo, I promise he's totally in on this. And there's much more explicit smut where this came from. Eventually.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Let's Stay In Tonight

Steve was sketching when Natasha wandered in. She’d come through the door, not the ventilation shaft, which was a nice change. JARVIS had notified him when she’d come in, and he’d told JARVIS to tell her he was in his art room. He was kind of on a roll and didn’t feel like stopping. 

She leaned in the doorway. “Oh,” she said. “Hey.” She was fresh out of the shower, hair damp and wavy, and in casual civvies, skinny jeans and a thigh-length black t-shirt with a mechanical silver heart on the front. “You doin’ art?”

“Yeah,” Steve said. He was revising a figure drawing he’d done earlier, an experiment with multi-figure compositions, and it was tricky. He’d gotten charcoal all over his hands and shirt at some point, and was on his fourth large-scale sketch. 

“Was that your career plan?” Natasha asked.

Steve rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes, realizing that he probably had charcoal all over his face now, and looked at her. “It was already what I was doing,” he said. “Mostly small-scale stuff, though. I knew I’d never be a painter.”

“Why not?” she asked. 

He gave her a half-grin. “I was colorblind,” he said. 

She stared at him. “Really,” she said. 

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Not totally, I mean— I could see colors, yeah, it’s just that the difference between red and green was kinda… I didn’t get what the fuss was.” 

“Oh,” she said. “And,” she gestured. “It got fixed?”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “It was— it actually was really really weird. I was _used_ to how it was, y’know?” 

“I bet,” she said.

“Sometimes Bucky would try to describe what I was missing,” Steve said. “And I sort of played along, but I never really thought it was all that. I mean, how do you describe red without just… calling it red? Or comparing it to itself? It’s really hard. My best strengths as an artist were my lines anyway, I wasn’t ever going to really miss color. It’s not like I couldn’t see detail, couldn’t see the intensity. I just couldn’t differentiate between a few hues, no big deal.” 

“Was he right, though?” Natasha asked. 

“Maybe,” Steve said. Now that he’d stepped back he could see where he needed to change the line of the lower figure’s back. It was probably a good thing she’d interrupted him, he’d’ve wasted another hour at least on this version and not figured out why it wasn’t working. He smiled, tore the sheet off the pad, and set it against the others. “One thing I really, really, really noticed though, when I could see color.”

“What?” she asked. 

“Red lipstick,” he said. He picked up the charcoal again and grinned at her. “Oh my God. It was a revelation.”

“Really,” she said, startled into a laugh. 

“Think about it,” he said. “You see the world, you see beauty everywhere, you see the blue sky, you see yellow, you see all these shades that kinda blend together and you know are pink and orange and red and all that, and you can tell when a doll’s got lipstick on, y’know, her mouth’s a little darker or paler and shinier. But red lipstick, holy shit. It was like a punch in the eye.”

“I bet,” she said, amused, and it was a kind of uncynical joyful amusement that she rarely indulged in. 

“First thing I saw,” he said. “I stepped outta that tank thing, and there’s Peggy Carter, and holy shit her _mouth_.”

Natasha laughed. “Wow,” she said, “I bet that was memorable.”

“I still notice it,” Steve confessed. “Every time somebody’s got red lipstick on I notice it.”

She grinned. “Does it get you hot?” she asked. 

“More than it should,” Steve said, rubbing the back of his neck. 

“You should do some art about that,” she said. 

“What, about my red lipstick kink?” Steve rolled his eyes. “No thanks, I think I did enough time on the eight-pager circuit.”

“The what?” She tilted her head, too quick on the uptake. Of course. 

Steve sighed, putting his hands on his hips. Whoops, now he had charcoal all over the sides of his shirt.“C’mon, I’m sure Bucky’s told everybody about that.”

“What?” She shook her head. “No!”

“I made up a couple rent shortfalls when I quit a job once by drawin’ nudie comics,” Steve said. “Just a few, here and there. Some for collectors and stuff, but a bunch for the real cheap little porno pamphlets you used to get behind the counter at drugstores if you knew the guy to ask. It was shady as hell but it was a damn sight better than some of the stuff Bucky still thinks I didn’t know he did when he was short on cash.”

Natasha looked like he’d just given her a beautiful, much-desired present. “Oh Steve,” she said, eyes shining. 

He laughed at her expression. “That really made your day, huh?”

“That’s just beautiful,” she said, shaking her head. “But I meant, you should do art about going from colorblindness to seeing color. It’s such a cool thought. I mean, nobody else in the history of ever has done that, it’s not the kind of thing that can be corrected.”

Steve tilted his head, looking at her. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s kind of… yeah, that’s a neat idea.”

“You know?” She was animated with the idea, eyes bright and face open like it rarely was. She was so different like this, and he treasured it, because he knew so few people ever saw her like this. This was her, this was Natalia, just a glimpse of who the little girl might have grown to be if she hadn’t gone through what she had. 

But it wasn’t that she wasn’t beautiful when she was armored, either— what she had become was certainly something to be proud of. Steve thought about that a moment, staring at the blank page on the easel. “Thing is,” he said, “it wasn’t… I wasn’t… I was okay, the way I was. I don’t want it to… I don’t want people who are colorblind to think they’re… not okay.”

“Oh,” she said, “right, that’s— that’s a good point.”

“People are shaped by what they are,” Steve said. “Shaped by what happens to them. And even if that means they’re…” He fumbled for words. “If it means they’re disabled, that doesn’t mean— they’re not _incomplete_ like that, you know? I mean, I’m glad not to have all those health problems, don’t get me wrong, but I wasn’t a bad person like that and my life wasn’t just all misery. It was okay. And it taught me a lot. And who I am now, it’s not— I wouldn’t be like this if I hadn’t been that. A lot of what I like about me now is only like that because of how I was then.”

“So paint pictures about that,” she said. 

He looked at her for a long moment, lost in thought. “Wanna model?” he asked suddenly. 

Her lips parted in surprise, and he watched her consider it. Then her mouth closed and she smiled. “Nude?”

He laughed. “Maybe,” he said. “I don’t have it worked out in my head yet. But don’t think I haven’t noticed how amazing you look in red lipstick.”

She grinned at him, again delighted. She wasn’t wearing lipstick now, but he could easily call to mind innumerable occasions when she had. She normally didn’t wear red, but when she did, it was exquisite. He could appreciate aesthetically what her more normal shades did for her, for the impression she wanted to create, for the overall look. But red on her was always a little zing right down his spine. 

“Draw me putting it on,” she said. “Like, there’s no other color in the picture except where I’m applying it.”

“That’d do for a small study,” he said. “I’d been thinking something like that. But I’d do that sharp black and white in ink, probably, and bright crimson red, no shading or gray or anything. I was thinking larger-scale, full-color, all muted hues, something more complicated.” He jerked his head at the failed sketches leaning on the wall, and laughed a little self-deprecatingly. “I’ve been trying to master more complicated compositions than just one person floating in midair, y’know?”

“I have an idea,” Natasha breathed, staring blankly, looking either really inspired or really troubled. And with that, she left. 

Steve laughed and went back to his multi-figure composition, turning over ideas in his head. 

 

 

“So what’s this crazy idea you have?” Bucky asked with elaborate patience, as Natasha pulled him in the door by the metal hand. He was pretending to be a lot less into this than he really was, Steve could tell easily, and he knew so could Natasha. Bucky was being obvious on purpose.

“Sit down,” Natasha said, and pushed him down onto the couch, straddling his lap. Steve looked up from his crossword puzzle. “Get your camera, Steve, I have your reference images.”

“Oh,” Steve said, “ _that_ idea.” He’d forgotten, it had been hours and he’d already showered off all the charcoal.

“Yeah,” she said. “For your painting. The light’s good here, right?”

“Yes,” Steve said, “actually.” Natasha had to have some art training, but she never talked about it. Well, she didn’t talk about much. Every scrap she let fall was precious. He obediently put the crossword down and went to get his sketchbook and the camera, swapping out the kit lens for the nice prime. Not that it mattered, but the thing was, if he didn’t want to make the painting, at least he could take some decent photos for her. 

And they would be beautiful, the sun was setting and the light was indirect and golden. It wouldn’t do for the color work he wanted to do, but for composition, it was perfect. Bucky was laughing up at her, and she had her hair curly— she’d done her eye makeup, she’d dressed for this, Steve realized. She was wearing a little strappy dress and no shoes, and Bucky had a really old-fashioned-looking collared shirt on. 

Natasha’s eyes were intent as he came back into the room and took the lens cap off. Bucky wasn’t paying attention to Steve at all, which was perfect; he was a little more preoccupied with the fact that Natasha was straddling his lap and carefully, artfully mussing his hair. He’d done it in a style really similar to how he’d used to wear it before the war, Steve noted absently— or she’d done it for him. 

Steve considered the composition, and took a few establishing shots, mostly for reference of how their bodies fit together. She was right, this was a good multi-figure composition— interacting like this, dependent on one another gravitationally, with some perspective issues depending on the angle. Photos only got you so far with that. 

Almost accidentally, he caught a very good portrait shot of Bucky’s face, laughing fondly up at Natasha as she tugged on a lock of his hair. He was shockingly beautiful when he was happy— the pictures he liked of himself were usually when he looked moody and brooding, but Steve always preferred the ones where he was lit up like this. 

“I had this idea,” she said, and picked up a little bag from the couch next to her knee. Steve recognized it as her cosmetic bag. “Steve was talking about how the serum changed his vision because he’d been colorblind before.”

“Ohhhh,” Bucky said knowingly, “red lipstick.”

“Exactly,” Natasha said, pulling a tube out of the bag. It was an old-fashioned looking tube, too, not one of the modern ones with the weird applicator tips or things.

“I see where you’re going with this,” Steve said, and moved to take a picture as she took the cap off the tube and rolled the lipstick out. 

“Patience,” she said, flicking Steve a look, and that was a really good picture of her, looking mischievous under her lashes as she gestured with the lipstick tube. 

She put one hand on the side of Bucky’s face, holding him steady. “Open,” she said. She was holding the lipstick angled the wrong way— oh.

“ _Oh_ ,” Steve said, a shock of realization sparking something low in his spine. He remembered just in time to bring the camera back up. Bucky looked slightly stunned, and turned-on, and generally perfect as Natasha glided the lipstick across his lower lip. 

“Purse,” she said, and Bucky obediently pursed his lips so she could fill in the upper lip. She worked slowly, biting her own lip, slow and hot, giving Steve plenty of time to get good angles of what she was doing. 

She sat back, looking pleased. “Blot,” she said. Bucky obediently pressed his lips together. “Mmmm,” she sighed. “That looks so good.” She put a tissue between his lips and he opened for it, then closed on it, and she pulled out a perfect lip print. 

“Whaddaya think,” Bucky said, mugging at Steve, “is it me?”

“You really do look hot,” Steve said honestly. 

“Ahh,” Bucky said dismissively, “you got that red lipstick thing though.”

“Now,” Natasha said decisively, “I get to kiss it off you.”

“Oh,” Bucky said. “I like that. Wait, shouldn’t I put some on you first?”

“Oh that would be cute,” Steve said. “If I did this as a series of drawings.”

Natasha handed the tube over to Bucky, who took it and applied it expertly. He was so deft Steve only had time to get a couple of shots, but he had the idea down, and the frame where Bucky bit his lip a little bit, tilting his head back for a better view, was just about perfect. 

“This would probably be cute if it was a pair of lesbians,” Natasha said reflectively, wiping her finger along the edge of Bucky’s lower lip where he’d smudged it a little. 

“Heh,” Steve said, “I don’t think my figure studies of Bucky can do double duty.”

“He’d be hot crossdressed, though,” Natasha said. “Look at this face! And his waist. He has a great ass.”

“Steve’s got a girl waist,” Bucky said. 

“No ass, though,” Natasha said. “And no hips at all. You have hips.”

“True,” Steve said. “I’m not saying he wouldn’t be hot like that, I’m just saying, he wouldn’t be very convincingly female.”

“Well,” Natasha said. “No. He’s also six feet tall and has shoulders like a linebacker.”

“And a metal arm,” Bucky said. 

“A woman could have a metal arm,” Steve pointed out.

“Can I kiss this lipstick off yet?” Bucky asked, fidgeting. 

“Oh,” Steve said, paging back through the photos he’d taken (seriously, digital was a million times better than film, hipsters were crazy), “go ahead, I’m all set. If you could stay in that position, though, that’d be helpful.”

“This position suits me just fine,” Bucky said, red mouth curling as he looked up at Natasha, and Steve sat and sketched out the rough blocks of their bodies, capturing the weight and gravity in the way a photograph couldn’t, while the two of them made out completely shamelessly right on his couch. 

Sam wandered in after about fifteen minutes, and stood there blinking a moment. “Uh,” he said. 

Steve looked up from his sketch. He was actually pretty turned-on, but he was also back in the zone with these drawings, and it was actually a kind of familiar and pleasant headspace. He’d done a fair number of figure studies of the girls Bucky had brought home during his teach-Steve-the-ropes-by-making-him-be-a-creepy-voyeur phase, and while he’d been uncomfortable, Steve had usually also been aroused as hell through the whole process. 

Those sketchbooks were probably in someone’s private collection by now. He hadn’t thought to ask the Smithsonian about them. They sure hadn’t been on display. He spared a moment to feel guilty that Peggy might have gotten the wrong idea from them, but really, there was nothing left to feel bad about there. There just wasn’t room. 

“Hey Sam,” Natasha said breathlessly, pushing back a little from Bucky. Oh, that was a good angle. Steve caught the posture in a few quick gestures. “We’re doing art!” She looked so proud of herself, hair disheveled in wild curls, face smeared with red lipstick, lips swollen from kissing. They were getting pretty hot and heavy, and she was blatantly grinding herself down into Bucky’s lap; Bucky was turned-on to the point that he looked dazed.

“What, performance art, or what?” Sam asked. 

“I’m drawing them,” Steve said. “Actually maybe a painting.”

Sam blinked. “This was Steve’s idea?”

“Mine,” Natasha said. 

“What,” Sam said blankly. 

“Don’t worry about it,” Steve said. “It’s a long story.”

“That’s a lot of lipstick,” Sam said. 

“Well,” Bucky said reasonably, “we _were_ both wearin’ it.” 

“Huh,” Sam said. He sat down on the arm of the chair next to Steve, and looked at the drawings. “Oh, I like the one where his hand’s on her tit. That’s classy.”

“Don’t you get smart,” Steve said, shooting him a look. He knew he tended to be cranky when people peeked over his shoulder while he was drawing. But Sam knew that too, so if he took offense, that was his own lookout.

“I’m not bein’ smart,” Sam said. “That’s— okay, I’m gonna get offended though, why you never draw me like that?”

“I draw you all the time,” Steve said absently, watching Bucky slide his hand up the outside of Natasha’s thigh, pushing her dress up— in the drawing, he’d make it clearly an old-fashioned slip, and maybe he’d have the top of her gartered stocking stick out there, the hem of the slip rucked up a little, yeah. Oh, one of the slip straps fallen off her shoulder, too. Putting her hair in curlers might be too much, though. That’d depend on how cute he could make it look.

“Yeah but not like this,” Sam said. 

Steve shot him a look. “You want me to draw you having sex,” he said. 

“We’re not havin’ sex,” Bucky said. “We could be, but I assure you, we’re definitely not right now, I’d know it.”

“Well,” Natasha said, a little breathless, “we definitely could be.” She slid two of her fingers into Bucky’s mouth, watching him with particular focus.

“Aw not on the couch,” Sam said.

“If they do it on the couch we can watch,” Steve said, not stopping the motion of his pencil. 

“Man,” Sam said, “You’re always so sunny, lookin’ on the bright side.”

Bucky laughed, but his mouth was too busy to come up with anything smart. 

 

It ended up just being a triptych of charcoal studies, monochrome, with bright red pencil for the lipstick. The first picture was a woman, in slip and stockings, sitting on the man’s lap, and him putting lipstick on her. The second picture, she was putting the lipstick on him. The third, they were kissing, though Steve had made it rather sweeter and less filthy than they’d actually been. 

He titled it “Let’s Just Stay In”, which was a little coy and old-fashioned of him, but he was old, so he could do what he wanted. 


End file.
